


The conception of Matthew Malvern

by womanroaring



Category: The Scorpio Races - Maggie Stiefvater
Genre: F/M, Pre-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-04-07
Updated: 2015-04-07
Packaged: 2018-03-21 17:19:42
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 618
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3700673
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/womanroaring/pseuds/womanroaring
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>I couldn't help wondering who Mutt Malvern's mother was, particularly given the hint we have that Malvern senior had had a liaison with Annie at some point in the past. </p><p>I also wondered about the suggestion that whoever it is in the horse's head, playing Epona at the Scorpio festival, can't actually see. </p><p>Once I found out that "Matthew" means gift from the divine, however, my imagination ran away from me.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The conception of Matthew Malvern

Once upon a time, there was a man named Benjamin Malvern. He was canny and ambitious and greedy as a goblin. He saw an island full of people in love with magic and horses and a way to profit from it all.

He had his hooks in the place before anyone had even noticed.

Every year, the island had a festival to celebrate the coming races. It had been 30 years since the place had stopped sacrificing a man at this rite but half the people present still remembered it and the other half heard about it at the first half’s knees. The priests had been replaced with “racing officials”, and the island’s abundance was dwindling because of it. People were leaving. Harvests were poorer. And the water horses were refusing to breed with the land horses, which was a problem for Malvern, because he had imagined a future of flogging part-breeds to men with clean hands and becoming richer than Croesus but he could not make it happen.

One year, he came up with a plan. He stalked the mare goddess at the festival that night, hoping for her wish, until she finally turned her blind eyes to him and said, “Benjamin Malvern, I see you. I see that you have bought my cathedral and my fields with your coin but that you are no priest of mine. You are going to need a priest if you are to get what you want. The sea will not listen to you just because you shout at it, any more than a horse will.”

She turned away but he grabbed her arm, and her shell fell from her hand. He caught it and she made a hissing noise. “That boon was not meant for you,” she said in her hoarse, harsh voice.

“But I have it all the same,” he said, and feeling the give of her flesh under his arm and realizing that she really did have a human shape, he whispered in her ear, “I want you to lie with me, and we will make a priest, and we will renew this place.”

She cocked her head at him. “I will lie with you, as your wish,” she said in a low voice that he could barely hear over the drummers, “since I have not had a man offered to me in a long time. But the child will be yours alone, and will be what you make him. I see a horse priest in Thisby’s future, someone with one foot on the island and one in the Scorpio Sea, a bridge for us all, but I do not think it will be your child.”

After the festival, Malvern stalked the goddess down to the beach. She would not lie down, but made him take her like they really were horses. She was still streaked with blood and ash and he ended covered in it as well. She shrugged him off afterwards and disappeared into the night.

So few people ever saw Annie that it wasn’t common knowledge she was pregnant. It was Dory Maud who brought the baby around to the Malvern yard, one drizzly evening, and deposited it, wrapped in a horse blanket, directly into Benjamin Malvern’s arms.

“This is no kin of ours,” Dory Maud said to him. “When she is Epona, she is not my sister. No sister of mine would have bothered with the likes of you. His name is Matthew, because he has been a gift from the divine. His fate is up to you, now.”

And she had stalked away without another word.

Malvern tried to raise him to be a horse priest. But the blood doesn’t always come through.


End file.
